ANSD : Five years on, Yazidis struggle to forget Daesh nightmare

TUE 26 - 11 - 2024

Date: Jun 21, 2019
Source: The Daily Star

Five years on, Yazidis struggle to forget Daesh nightmare

_{Antonia Williams-Annunziata| The Daily Star}
DAHUK, Iraq: Silham was 21 years old when Daesh (ISIS) militants sold her into sexual slavery. Raped and beaten, she moved from one Syrian town to the next, sold every seven to 10 days for the equivalent of just a few dollars.

At first, Silham thought she could buy herself some time between auctions, where dozens of militants would gather to buy and sell Yazidi girls. “We were like sheep being sold at the market,” Silham said. She tried making herself look less desirable. She cut her face with anything she could find, picked off her skin, ripped off her eyebrows. But her efforts failed.

Silham was eventually forced to marry a Daesh militant from Mosul whom she lived with for a year and a half. “I tried killing myself three times,” Silham said. But leaving her child - who she gave birth to before Daesh’s invasion of Sinjar in 2014, was not an option. “I knew that I had stay alive for her,” she said.

“Every second was hell. I knew I couldn’t live like this - not knowing when I was going to die, or not knowing the fate of my family,” Silham said. “I knew I had to plan my escape. I needed to gain his [my husband’s] trust. That was my only chance.”

Like all those interviewed for this story, Silham chose not to disclose the details of her escape, citing security reasons.

TRAUMA AND THERAPY

Nestled in a small corner in her office, Galavej Jaafar Mohammed regularly takes time out of her day to sit in silence, aimlessly staring out her window. “The stories I hear make me feel sick,” she said. “Some days I need to take a minute [to myself] to try and process everything I hear during the day.”

Galavej, lead psychotherapist at the Dahuk Child and Adolescent Mental Health Center (CAMHC), has overseen hundreds of cases of Yazidis who’ve escaped after years in captivity. “I remember when Silham first arrived at the [mental health] center,” Galavej said. “Her face still had a haunted look. She had scars everywhere.”

“[The] flashbacks, nightmares, guilt and shame, kept me up all night,” Silham said. Something Galavej has seen firsthand.

“Young girls in particular were raped, but also witnessed the death of their fathers and rape of their mothers. Instead, young boys have been brainwashed, and transformed into child soldiers,” Galavej said. “It takes years to ease out of their lives.”

For the past three years, Nizar Esmat, director-general of government health department in Dahuk, has led a specialized treatment program helping Yazidi survivors overcome years of psychological trauma.

“We follow different treatment [programs] depending on the age of the patient. Many [children] like the drawing therapy. But their pictures are all about death, blood and violence,” Galavej said.

“For many young Yazidis, girls and boys, expressing themselves through drawing is easier than saying things out loud.”

They draw beheadings and torture scenes. They sketch rapes and mass killings. Blood is depicted everywhere, erratically drawn over images trying to hide memories under layers of crayons.

Supported by a team of specialists, Esmat is currently treating 700 Yazidis at the CAMHC, the only facility in Iraqi Kurdistan and the region that specializes in providing treatment, counseling and psycho-social education.

“We treat any child or adult who seeks our help and also provide regular Kurdish classes for children, particularly teenage boys, who don’t understand Kurdish anymore,” Esmat said.

At the height of Daesh’s presence in Iraq, the Yazidis, an ethnic religious minority in the country’s Sinjar district, received the full brunt of the group’s brutal campaign. Thousands of men were massacred, boys were indoctrinated in militant ideology and women were sold as sex slaves.

In March, an all-out U.S.-backed and Kurdish-led offensive liberated the last pocket of territory held by Daesh in the border village of Baghouz, marking the end of a brutal self-styled caliphate the group carved out of swathes of Iraq and Syria in 2014.

According to statistics released in May 2019 by the Kurdistan Regional Government, over 3,300 Yazidis had been rescued from Daesh since 2014. Dindar Zebari, the KRG’s coordinator for international advocacy, said the militant group had kidnapped at total of 6,284 Yazidis. The whereabouts of at least 2,000 men and women are still unknown.

While it represents a significant milestone in Syria’s 8-year-old civil war and battle against the militant group, Daesh remains a threat.

“It’s important that we deliver a long-term strategy to help Yazidis in this post-Daesh phase,” Esmat said. “The Daesh ideology is still alive and active in the area, and we have to address this.”

INDOCTRINATION

Zaad was around 11 when he was taken and trained in militant ideology. He converted to Islam and was forced to fight in front-line battles. “I was surrounded by death,” Zaad said, with a vacant stare as if replaying the scenes in his mind.

“I didn’t have any compassion or feelings,” he said. “If they said to kill, I did it. It was me against everyone else, so I did what they [militants] said,” Zaad added in a soft mumble.

Seated across from Zaad, Galavej cautioned against venturing too deep into the topic.

“He cut off the head of man,” Galavej said. “But I don’t want to go there because it’s very difficult to pull him out [of that state of mind].”

“They deleted anything that had to do with his [Zaad’s] identity,” Galavej said. “Daesh stripped him of anything that previously belonged to him; they transformed him into a child soldier.”

“[At first] it was very obvious that Zaad’s behavior was heavily affected by the war,” she said. “He was aggressive; he fought with every kid at the center for months.”

“Daesh brainwashed young boys in a very calculated way,” Galavej said. After separating the boys from their families the militants were able to gain full control over their minds, she added. “He was repeatedly told that Daesh was his new family.”

“As a very young kid, it’s easy to absorb the information they are taught. So it’s easy for them to control them compared to older men.” But she said after a year of intensive sessions, 15-year-old Zaad has shown some progress.

MERGING TWO DEPARTMENTS

In February 2019, Esmat announced the opening of a new tri-partner project with doctors at the CAMHC, AISPO - a Milan-based NGO - and a small multidisciplinary team of Italian experts from the University of Trieste.

Esmat, AISPO and the team of experts conducted an initial report in October 2018, evaluating the mental health state found among Yazidis at the center, as well as recording the political changes taking place at the heart of the Yazidi community.

“There are two different approaches [to the project],” Esmat said. “The science-based medical approach to tackling PTSD, and the anthropological angle the Italian experts are taking.”

Anna Pelamatti, who leads the team of experts, strongly believes that integrating the different angles to the research will provide sufficient information to then produce a blueprint for future reintegration programs in the region.

In April, Pelamatti’s team inaugurated a training program consisting of specialist training classes available to anyone seeking such education. “Our scope is to train as many specialists in child and adolescent care.

“Within the first week, 40 doctors from all over the district have already signed up,” Pelamatti said. “Being able to train a new generation of specialists is essential for crises like these.”

Providing and spreading knowledge about mental health and trauma for Yazidi survivors is a step Galavej and Pelamatti believe will play an integral role toward a successful recovery.

YAZIDI REINTEGRATION AND DAESH CHILDREN

Zina was 19 when Daesh militants sold her as a sex slave. “Before Daesh, before all of that, I had a great life,” said Zina, who is now 21. “I was so in love with my partner.” She married her childhood sweetheart six months before Daesh invaded Sinjar in August 2014. The militants briefly reunited the couple for one month, and Zina became pregnant. Then Daesh sent her husband away. She hasn’t seen or heard from him since.

“Daesh [militants] didn’t care I was pregnant,” Zina said, as she anxiously picked off her already-chipped nail polish. “The militants continued to rape me,” she said. “I would fall and pass out for hours. They took me to see a doctor many times - he would say the baby wasn’t well, but they didn’t care.”

“The only reason why I’m alive is because of my daughter,” Zina said.

In April 2019, the Yazidi Spiritual Council issued a decree excluding Daesh children from the community. At the center, Yazidi mothers find a difficult decision ahead. In some cases, they choose to leave their children behind and return to their communities. In others, women choose to live in exile but remain with their children. The doctors at the center were unable to confirm the exact number of children born from Daesh militants.

Esmat said no more than 20 children are currently receiving treatment at the CAMHC. “So far there have been seven adoptions, but there are many mothers who want to keep the babies,” he said.

For doctors at the center, the decree issued by the Yazidi religious council is one example of the obstacles that lay ahead for Yazidi women. “The transition from Daesh captivity into their communities is not a smooth one,” Esmat added.

According to Galavej and Pelamatti, this ruling will prove detrimental. “Their babies are the reason most [mothers] are alive,” Pelamatti said. “Separating mothers from their children is traumatic in itself, and will pile on the pre-existing trauma they were subjected to while in captivity. They will live in agony, and it will be twice as hard to get them out of that [mental health] state.”

“My family is more open-minded - they accepted my baby,” Zina said. “They also know my daughter isn’t a Daesh baby. “But my mother-in-law refuses to accept my baby. She is convinced she is Daesh’s baby.”

Zina has since been excommunicated from her community, and lives in a camp for the displaced in the outskirts of Dahuk. “As long as I can live with my daughter, my life is alright,” she said.

For Silham, her freedom proved to come at a higher price. “After my freedom I returned to no family, no friends and no community,” she said. Her mother-in-law took her child when she returned, fearing he was born from a militant father.

This past year, Silham was offered a chance to study and join her sister and mother in Germany - the only remaining members of her family. She declined the offer and chose to remain in Iraq. “I can’t leave without my daughter. I talk to her [in my dreams] every night till morning. The pain of not having her is something you will never understand.”

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